


Laura's First Day in The Real World Kinda Sucks

by drneroisgod



Category: H.I.V.E. Series - Mark Walden
Genre: Angst, Gen, just the feeling of being bummed out, not exactly sad, post-graduation blues, sorry c
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-05
Updated: 2021-02-05
Packaged: 2021-03-16 19:27:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29212659
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/drneroisgod/pseuds/drneroisgod
Summary: Laura graduated from H.I.V.E.—she doesn't know how to feel about it.
Kudos: 3





	Laura's First Day in The Real World Kinda Sucks

If anything, Laura felt embarrassed to be out-and-about. Here she was, breathing the free air for the first time in six years and she was playing Spy vs. Spy with enemies she hadn’t even made yet.

Well, as far as she could tell. After an hour of window-shopping, she felt relatively certain she wasn’t being tailed, but the possibility continued to nag at her. 

_ My life is never going to be normal again, _ she thought despondently.  _ If it ever was. _

Laura was just slightly out of rhythm with everything, nowadays. When her friends were up to their ears in anxiety over final exams, Laura felt nothing. When they laughed and hugged, diplomas in hand, Laura thought she might cry. When Wing gave her one of his characteristic bear hugs before they parted, she did. And finally, in Glasgow, Laura felt that everything around here was not quite real anymore; that, or she was the unreal one. 

Maybe she was just lonely. H.I.V.E. had given her friends and protection and she had depended on those things for a very, very long time. She had never been very good at adjusting to change.

She saw them, then: her family. Her mum, getting gray around the temples and wrapped in a heavy sweater. Her dad had a cane now, there was a story there. And little Douglas was getting to be not-so-little anymore. He’d be five, soon. He had a coloring book and a stuffed lion to occupy him, and he was ignoring both. 

It was stupid, making her family meet her in a food court. Was her entire life going to be spent arranging to meet her family in public places after spending an hour losing tails? She was beginning to understand why Dr. Nero had made a point of getting a bodyguard.

She took a seat on the other side of the food court, sunglasses pushed up and a book in front of her face. They wouldn’t recognize her. She knew they wouldn’t.

“Why Laura,” her father would say. “You’ve become a young lady.”

She could do without that comment for the time being. She was content to watch them for a few moments longer, get used to the tempo they had accomplished without her. She had no illusions about finding a home with them again. Too much had happened for that. 

Still.

That morning she had made herself scrambled eggs and read The New York Times in her underwear, absent-mindedly picking at the twine on a box of bath bombs she had bought to celebrate the occasion. It was embarrassing, too, that at the very moment she would finally get to see her parents again, she was dreaming of the loneliness of bathwater. 

Well, no point in putting it off. Laura went. She bought a plate of chips to share and sipped a chai that smelled like lavender, and let her parents talk with her. 

“And you made friends?” her mother asked, her arms squeezing Douglas as he wriggled.

“Yes,” Laura said. “I’ll introduce you to them someday. They’re the most wonderful people I’ve ever met.”

“Invite them to dinner,” her father suggested. “We got a bigger dining room table while you were gone.”

Laura smiled. “I’ll pass it on when I can. We’re not supposed to contact anyone else from the school for a year after graduation. Security reasons.”

“Oh. Well, later then.”

“Yeah,” Laura said, eyeing a chocolate shop and thinking that perhaps she needed more than a bath bomb to cheer her up. “Later.”


End file.
